Weil called our bodies “a source of mystery that we cannot eliminate.” We are here as our bodies or not at all; we are free as our bodies or not at all. In notebooks that she kept during the war, Weil wrote of gravity and grace. We are a special sort of creature, subject to the laws of physics but able to understand them—and to bend them to purposes that are not reducible to them. The body wends its way between the world of things as they are and the world of things as they might be. Weil’s “mystery” was the presence of the body in both realms, the is and the ought. To be sovereign means to
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